Alyssa Pointer | Reuters Follow CNBC’s live blog coverage of Monday’s campaigns ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Georgia’s secretary of state launched an investigation Monday into the failure of the county Board of Elections and Registration to mail more than 1,000 absentee ballots to voters after two civil rights groups filed a lawsuit over the situation. Within hours of the investigation being announced, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit told NBC News that Cobb County had agreed to extend the absentee voting deadline to Nov. 14. The investigation was announced a day before Election Day, when one of Georgia’s US Senate seats, all of the state’s congressional districts and its governor’s office are up for grabs. In the Senate race, polls show a statistical deadlock between incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, the former football star who is the Republican nominee. The contest is one of the few that will decide which party controls the Senate. In a statement, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office called the unmailed ballots “unacceptable.” “We have initiated an investigation and will report to the State Board of Elections to determine appropriate consequences,” the office said. Raffensperger, who is the state’s top elections official, is one of the defendants in the lawsuit, along with Cobb County officials and the state Board of Elections. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed the lawsuit Sunday in county Superior Court on behalf of four Cobb County voters. The lawsuit alleges that the Cobb County Board of Elections failed to timely mail absentee ballots to all voters whose applications for such ballots had been accepted.
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Read more about CNBC’s political coverage: “The Cobb board failed to timely mail absentee ballots, for example, to approximately 1,036 voters whose absentee ballot applications were marked as issued on October 13, 2022 and October 22, 2022,” the lawsuit filed Sunday said. “It is anticipated that ballots marked as issued on other dates were also not processed or mailed in a timely manner,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit said that without immediate action by a judge, “hundreds of Cobb County voters are on the brink of being disenfranchised.” The lawsuit asked a judge to order the board of elections to overnight mail absentee ballots to voters who had not already had those ballots mailed overnight and to extend the receipt deadline for all absentee ballots in the voter class covered by the lawsuit. “If there is no relief, these voters will likely be unable to participate in the November 8, 2022 general election despite being properly registered to vote, requesting their absentee ballot by the absentee ballot request deadline, and frequently contacting the Council of Cobb multiple times on their own to inquire about the status of their absentee ballot request,” the lawsuit said. The Cobb County Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Saturday, the board issued a statement saying it opened an investigation into the ballots after some residents reported not receiving them. Director of Elections and Registration Janine Eveler blamed the situation on what the statement called “human error, with new staff not following procedures for two days to ensure ballots were mailed.” Eveler told the council, “I’m sorry this office let these voters down.” “Many of the absent staff are averaging 80 or more hours a week and are exhausted,” he said. “However, this is no excuse for such a critical error.” The board said “election staff distributed absentee ballots to 83 out-of-state addresses and included prepaid return envelopes overnight.” “They had already overnighted ballots to 194 residents in this group who had requested ballots,” the statement said. “Records show that another 271 residents in this group had canceled their request to vote and voted during advance voting. The remaining 498 residents identified are being asked to vote in person on Election Day.”
